Anger at past mental therapists

Today I would like to express anger at past mental health therapist.As a teenager I saw a therapist who was a real jerk, and a few other words that were much stronger. He did not show any respect or compassion for me. When I truthful answered "I don’t know" to some of his questions he got very irritated with me instead of helping me figure things out. When I did not show improvement he called me a difficult patient and played blame the patient. After a while, I faked a recovery to get out of therapy.In short he was an easy person to hate. But my second therapist, who I saw in my 30’s was a very nice person who treated me with compassion and respect. I liked her as a person, and I feel like she helped me a lot. But the treatment was very different from what is discussed hear. She is a cognitive behavior therapist. The therapy focused very heavily on using thinking and logic to help work through emotional issues. One of the things she talked about was learning to ignore what she called the "lizard brain" and telling it there is no reason to be scared. This is the primitive part of our brain that sends out fight or flight signals when there is no real physical danger. Toward the end of the therapy I had mixed feelings. I had made lots of progress. And I felt like I had talked my childhood issues and current stresses to death. Yet something inside me did not feel 100% healed. My therapist felt I was well enough to end therapy and any doubts I had about ending it were due to minor insecurity.With what I have read now, I feel like maybe that was the opposite to the approach I should have taken. I discussed stuff, and I may have cried a few times, but I never experience the full on rage that was deeply buried during any of the sessions. Maybe I would have been better served by primal scream therapy or taking lessons in kick boxing.I feel angry that the therapy did not cover letting out my anger and feeling my rage. I am not sure if I feel angry at my most recent therapist. She was kind, competent and genuinely wanted to help me get better. But I do feel anger at the whole situation.

Hi
I spent many years off andf on with therapists. Yes there are good and bad..... and some that just dont suit.
Sometimes the therapist you feel most at ease with..may not be the best.... but you have to at least like the person.. and be treated with respect.
My last therapist was very likeable..but he would push for answers.... and explained that he wasnt there to make me feel totally comfortable... but to make me look seriously at why I felt so lost.. and scared of being alive.
He did the most for me out of all my years of therapy..... and he made me write a couple of letter to people that had made a bad impression in my head..... just like a little journal. That felt quite strange.
My therapy ended all too soon.... and I felt halfway better than ever..... but needed more time.
I nosedived again after therapy and just became low and swamped with arthritic stuff etc... and 2 years later... thats now... I found this place.... luckily.

KathyBee, there's much to say from what you say. Carl Jung noted that it didn't seem to matter what type of therapy was being utilized, the most important thing was that the patient liked the therapist. That being said, Dr. Sarno and his colleagues have said cognitive behavioral therapy doesn't work for TMS, by itself. It's all well and good to talk about the past, it makes people feel good inside, and could be generally healthy, but it doesn't stop TMS.

As he has said on many occasions, it is worthless to try to dig up or uproot the unconscious rage. You have to connect the symptom to the emotions. And of course understand why you have these thoughts. For ex., why do you still harbor anger from the past at a therapist, or in your case "thera-pissed?" Let it go. I could guess and say that they weren't there when you needed them most, but that just goes back to McKenzie's work on separation anxiety. Everything comes back to his work, and guilt and shame, and helplessness, and panic, etc.

You liked the one therapist because she was there when you needed her. In an interview last week the host asked what it (TMS-healing) all came down to? I told her that people just want to know if anyone really cares.

You can kick box and primal scream all you want but all that does is tire you out and make you think you have released the rage. But it doesn't work that way. As long as the psychological conflict remains the symptom will need attention. To quote America's best pain doctor, "the brain will not be denied!" You can medicate it, alcoholize it, cut it, stab it, and wish it away, but it demands attention--thus, the symptom imperative. An imperative is something that demands attention. TMS demands attention. That's why people like therapists who pay attention, who really listen. The TMS is substituting for someone in the sufferer's life that wasn't paying attention, and the child gets stifled like Edith Bunker. The symptom itself is the inner self crying out to be heard. When we've said our "peace" and we're doing what we want in life, and we feel we're being heard, the TMS cannot stay because it has no more purpose.

So it's vital to find someone who cares, and then to let go of past attachments, like hanging onto grievances from the past.

KathyBee, I hear you.
SteveO speaks of the 'thera pissed' and at 15, I endured 'hypno the rapist'.* Strangely enough I have issues trusting such people now and that is a tragedy because I could do with someone who actually cares. Jeffrey Masson once said (in Against Therapy) that all folk need is a good friend who will actually listen. He's not wrong but I have a hunch that most of us fare better with 'strangers on a train' and in this world that pretty much equals forums such as this.
Forest, how's about a Screaming Room here? Somewhere less rational where we can purge.

* not making light of this. The ******* is residing at Her Majesty's Pleasure. I posted about this at tmshelp and people were very kind.

Very sad that you had to endure that... in search of help. I feel for you.
Its shocking also to realise just how many people are assaulted in this way... whilst just going about their day.
Best regards
Leo

The infective therapists are many. The excellent few. In the end they are "paid friends" This comment is not directed against the excellent, but the ones you pay for an hour to listen to what you would tell a close friend, a friend who has common sense. Many therapists do not believe in emotions causing physical symptoms, and they certainly cannot tell you why you hurt where you do, as they lack medical training and cannot dx anyway. . Alan Gordon seems like an excellent therapist, and many could probably get more out of his comments and posts and recordings than going to "see" a therapists. My pet peeve was a therapist who made it so obvious that she was watching the clock that I felt symptoms increase in intensity just sitting there. I know they have to make money, but there are less obvious ways of keeping time.

In some cases a bad therapist can do more harm than good and set you up for a set back.

Still, when you find a good one it is worth it. They can see objectively what you cannot.

Hi, Plum. A friend's wife had a good experience with a mental therapist and I'd like to share it.

Bonnie was a wife and mother of three young kids and had smarts, looks, and she and her husband both came from wealthy parents.
But she began seeing two heads on those she loved and tried suicide several times. No one knew what was depressing her, but she
finally had to get psychiatric help in a hospital. Long story short, she came through it after several months and learned how to cope with her depression.

Under diagnosis, she told of childhood trauma because her mother gave her younger sist er love, but not her. One day her mother told Bonnie,
"I wish you had been a cat, so I could have drowned you."

Bonnie grew up with that, repressing the rejection, but it finally surfaced. TMS? I'm sure it was. The psychiatric therapy helped her so much she forgave her mother and, when her mother was dying in Florida, flew there to comfort her. Bonnie fully recovered. I didn't know at the time,
quite a few years ago, that Bonnie's mental health returned because she practiced TMS healing, not even knowing about TMS back then.

I'm sorry you had some bad experiences with mental therapists, but now I wonder if we need them, now that we know about TMS healing?
We can put the past behind us and focus now on learning what are repressed emotions are that are causing us pain or mental problems.

A priest said today at Mass: "No one can start today and make a new beginning, but anyone can start today to make a new ending."
I liked that but think he was wrong. We can make both. We may not be able to erase the past trauma, but we can make a new beginning and ending by accepting and forgiving, others and ourselves.

I think probably a big part of what helped me with my second therapist was simply having someone to share things with. Having someone who acted compassionate and non-judgmental is good.I think I would be uncomfortable sharing some of these darker parts of myself with people I know in real life. It is easier for me to do that with people on line, provided you have a good group, like this one, to share with.Plus I do not want to be thought of as the lady who complains all the time. Or maybe more accurately, I do not want to be the lady who complains all the time.SteveO, thank you for your confirmation that cognitive behavior therapy by itself does not work. I would have thought primal scream therapy would fit with the whole express your emotions things though.As far as letting go of the anger from my first therapist, I am not sure if I have felt it yet. Or if I have felt it enough. That sounds a bit strange. But I tend to intellectualize everything including my emotions. That is even though I might write about how angry I was, I tend to feel very detached and aloof while writing it. Yet there is some part of me that is aware that I feel anger at about it.Oddly enough I am feeling incredibly sad right now while I am writing this, though I was not feeling emotional when I was writing the first post in this thread. I have been trying to get myself to feel more of the emotions that I am detached from. I am able to allow myself to feel some sadness and anger while I am journaling or remembering past (or current) issues. Yet I feel that the level of emotions I am feeling are somewhat blunted. Like am allowing myself to feel a bit angry, yet not the full out rage that I believe belongs with some of these events. So do I need to feel it fully, instead of just feel it before I can let it go?I was watching a television show where a teenage girl had a bad break up. She is so upset, she trashes her room, including breaking her window and reducing a pillow to little tiny pieces. When she is finished her hand is bleeding. I feel like I have that level of anger inside me but the anger it is being reduced to a more acceptable level. Like my anger at something is actually a 9 or 10 , but I can only feel it at around a 3 or 4. Like I am scared to feel it fully.When I journal my issues a lot of anger comes out in the writing. The words become huge and the penmanship barely legible. And there are lots of swear words and excess punctuation. I am not doing that consciously, it just happens. Yet while I am writing it, what I am feeling does not match the intensity of what is on the page. Like a split brain kind of thing? Does that count as feeling the anger?

KathyBee, there's much to say from what you say. Carl Jung noted that it didn't seem to matter what type of therapy was being utilized, the most important thing was that the patient liked the therapist. That being said, Dr. Sarno and his colleagues have said cognitive behavioral therapy doesn't work for TMS, by itself. It's all well and good to talk about the past, it makes people feel good inside, and could be generally healthy, but it doesn't stop TMS.
...
So it's vital to find someone who cares, and then to let go of past attachments, like hanging onto grievances from the past.

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Steve-

To put another piece through the loom, you may want to consider the work of Dr. Richard Kradin and his placebo findings, which promote the view that placebo receptivity is largely correspondent to the absence or presence of healthy early attachments, and that the phenomenology of the placebo can be constrained to how well a stressed subject can be reconvened to an earlier state of de-stressing, namely if the caretaker's emotional nourishment can match the biochemical vintage of what the stressed subject once felt during peace...if it can be remembered or was ever even had.

The placebo response represents an enigmatic element of therapeutics. The potency of placebo effects is highlighted by the fact that the current gold standard for determining therapeutic efficacy, the randomized controlled clinical trial, is based on identifying treatment responses that are statistically superior to those elicited by a placebo. Although much has been written concerning the phenomenology of placebos, little is known concerning how they are elicited, although recent research has demonstrated that placebo effects are mediated via objective physiological pathways. I have previously argued that the placebo response is a developmental achievement, rooted in implicit procedural memories that are linked to background affects of well-being evoked by a relational dynamic with a caregiver. This article develops this idea further, suggesting that placebo response represents a nervous-system response aimed at countering the dysphoric effects attributable to chronic stress, and that it is dependent on developmental attachment dynamics. A range of behaviors by caregivers that mimic those achieved during secure attachment are suggested to promote placebo responses.

From Edward Shorter (From Paralysis to Fatigue) to Antonovsky, I am starting to believe, as has been implied before, that the best engineers of a compelling psychosomatic corpus (pun intended) are the medical sociologists, who can string together the incidences of mind-body into relatively obvious strands of chronology, which are made unobvious by the contemporary factions of self-interest.

Salutogenesis is a term coined by Aaron Antonovsky,[1] a professor of medical sociology. The term describes an approach focusing on factors that support human health and well-being, rather than on factors that cause disease. More specifically, the "salutogenic model" is concerned with the relationship between health, stress, and coping.Antonovsky's theories reject the "traditional medical-model dichotomy separating health and illness". He described the relationship as a continuous variable, what he called the "health-ease versus dis-ease continuum".[1]

The word "salutogenesis" comes from the Latin salus = health and the Greek genesis = origin. Antonovsky developed the term from his studies of "how people manage stress and stay well".[2] He observed that stress is ubiquitous, but not all individuals have negative health outcomes in response to stress. Instead, some people achieve health despite their exposure to potentially disabling stress factors.In his 1979 book, Health, Stress and Coping, Antonovsky described a variety of influences that led him to the question of how people survive, adapt, and overcome in the face of even the most punishing life-stress experiences. In his 1987 book, Unraveling the Mysteries of Health, he focused more specifically on a study of women and aging; he found that 29% of women who had survived concentration camps had positive emotional health, compared to 51% of a control group. His insight was that 29% of the survivors were notemotionally impaired by the stress. Antonovsky wrote: "this for me was the dramatic experience that consciously set me on the road to formulating what I came to call the 'salutogenic model'."[2]In salutogenic theory, people continually battle with the effects of hardship. These ubiquitous forces are called generalized resource deficits (GRDs). On the other hand, there are generalized resistance resources (GRRs), which are all of the resources that help a person cope and are effective in avoiding or combating a range of psychosocial stressors. Examples are resources such as money, ego-strength, and social support.GRDs will cause the coping mechanisms to fail whenever the sense of coherence is not robust to weather the current situation. This causes illness and possibly even death. However, if the sense of coherence is high, a stressor will not necessarily be harmful. But it is the balance between GRDs and GRRs that determines whether a factor will be pathogenic, neutral, or salutary. [1][3]Antonovsky's formulation was that the GRRs enabled individuals to make sense of and manage events. He argued that over time, in response to positive experiences provided by successful use of different GRRs, an individual would develop an attitude that was "in itself the essential tool for coping".[1]Sense of coherence[edit]

The "sense of coherence" is a theoretical formulation that provides a central explanation for the role of stress in human functioning. "Beyond the specific stress factors that one might encounter in life, and beyond your perception and response to those events, what determines whether stress will cause you harm is whether or not the stress violates your sense of coherence." [4] Antonovsky defined Sense of Coherence as:[2][5]"a global orientation that expresses the extent to which one has a pervasive, enduring though dynamic feeling of confidence that (1) the stimuli deriving from one's internal and external environments in the course of living are structured, predictable and explicable; (2) the resources are available to one to meet the demands posed by these stimuli; and (3) these demands are challenges, worthy of investment and engagement." [6]In his formulation, the sense of coherence has three components:

Comprehensibility: a belief that things happen in an orderly and predictable fashion and a sense that you can understand events in your life and reasonably predict what will happen in the future.

Manageability: a belief that you have the skills or ability, the support, the help, or the resources necessary to take care of things, and that things are manageable and within your control.

Meaningfulness: a belief that things in life are interesting and a source of satisfaction, that things are really worthwhile and that there is good reason or purpose to care about what happens.

According to Antonovsky, the third element is the most important. If a person believes there is no reason to persist and survive and confront challenges, if they have no sense of meaning, then they will have no motivation to comprehend and manage events. His essential argument is that "salutogenesis" depends on experiencing a strong "sense of coherence." His research demonstrated that the sense of coherence predicts positive health outcomes.Fields of application[edit]

Antonovsky viewed his work as primarily addressed to the fields of health psychology, behavioral medicine, and the sociology of health.[2] The term has been adopted in the medical fields of healthcare and preventive medicine.[citation needed] It has also been adopted as a term to describe contemporary approaches to nursing,[7] psychiatry,[8] and healthcare architecture.[9][10] The salutogenic framework has also been adapted as a method for decision making on the fly; the method has been applied for emergency care[11][12]and for healthcare architecture.[10][13][14][15]

I have a hunch that God loves us for trying to figure out what our minds do to us. He knows, and I think he led Dr. Sarno to telling us about TMS because it has led many if not all of us TMSers to learn more about ourselves and each other, which ultimately leads us to like, if not love, ourselves and each other. And to forgive. Others have known how our early lives and repressed emotions affect us physically, they just didn't have a name for it, and they also may have been afraid of being laughed at or scorned as doctors or philosophers. There is a lot of TMS wisdom in the Bible. And a lot of placebo naysayers.

Plum, I'm a believer in screaming. Just not very long or loud so it scares my dog or worries my neighbors.
A good screaming room could be the bathroom. But anyone room could be another room that helps me:
The Laughing Room. For me, laughing drives away any reason for screaming.

Plum, I'm a believer in screaming. Just not very long or loud so it scares my dog or worries my neighbors.
A good screaming room could be the bathroom. But anyone room could be another room that helps me:
The Laughing Room. For me, laughing drives away any reason for screaming.

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Walt, this is one of the reasons I like working with 11-14 year olds: they make me laugh. Some days they make me cry as well, but they do make me laugh! Many of them have no "filter;" you know exactly what they're thinking because they TELL you!!!
Without a sense of humor, I wouldn't last a day!

Sense of coherence ... now that is a concept that pierces me. Perhaps it is another piece of the puzzle. Thank you JEgol71 for presenting it.

with grace and gratitude,
^_^

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My pleasure, Lily Rose. These concepts are all interchangeable when viewed from a high-enough elevation.

I found that my pain became chronic -- injuries sticking to flypaper -- when my sense of coherence was inwardly rended at 22, yet I was soldiering ahead with a vim that explicitly defied how out-of-touch I was with my life's unfolding catastrophe, which I did nothing about for two years (and some would say 24 years).

I still don't feel "cohered," but I recently made a huge physical move -- and therefore one that must be beneath the modular cognition shifts providing short-term pacification to the genesis of symptoms -- that is designed to give my life a booster shot of meaning.

Perhaps in meaning we flow through an awareness of happiness, and when happy we flow through an awareness of meaning, a cruel harmonic as despite the semantic proximity the world relates to the two, we're almost -- in the manner Heisenberg demonstrated how position and velocity cannot be simultaneously measured -- disallowed from having both, because if truly happy there's not a lot of time to think about our place within things (right, Buddhists?)

Meaning seems to possess a more academic rigor to it, almost like a ratio of done: to do, whereas happiness, tragically, is the end product we most value, yet is never an end.

1. I am a *sex machine*. Apollo and Dionysus. Voluptuousness. Let us drown in 'The Ocean of Sex'. To fully open her heart, a woman must open her body. Thus is her divine nature revealed. Sexual Alchemy vs. TMS.